You need to hear this.

Another day, another breach. It's easy to get numb to the constant news of companies being hacked or leaking personal information. But some security incidents still capture the imagination, due to their sheer magnitude.

On Nov. 30, Marriott International revealed that they were the victims of the second largest breach of all time, only second to the the Yahoo! breaches (which affected billions of records). This story was first mentioned in the Community by CulesFlatlander.

According to the BBC:

"The records of 500 million customers of the hotel group Marriott International have been involved in a data breach. The hotel chain said the guest reservation database of its Starwood division had been compromised by an unauthorised party. It said an internal investigation found an attacker had been able to access the Starwood network since 2014. The company said it would notify customers whose records were in the database."

Indian police arrest two dozen cybercriminals

This next story of cybercriminals being brought to justice comes to us via the Breaking News forum in Spiceworks, originally posted by rickmarvel.

According to ABC News:

"Indian police said Thursday they have arrested nearly two dozen people on suspicion of defrauding people around the world by sending fake pop-up messages warning them that their computers were infected with a virus and offering to fix the problem at a price. Police officer Ajay Pal Sharma said those arrested Tuesday and Wednesday posed as representatives of Microsoft and other companies and used their logos. The arrests were made after input from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Interpol, Sharma said. Microsoft was the complainant in the case."

As to whether the malicious pop-up messages will stop after this arrest ... One can hope, but I'm not keeping my fingers crossed.

But there's more going on in the world than that.

Microsoft Office to get a style makeover

Sometimes change is good. We don't want to keep living with the same old-fashioned tech. But at the same time, IT pros around the world will surely get some tickets about changes coming soon to Microsoft Office from users who are stuck in their ways.

According to The Verge:

"Microsoft is modernizing its Office icons as part of a broader focus on design for its various Office apps ... and they’re designed to be more simple and modern to span across multiple devices and platforms ... These icons are designed to reflect how Office has changed recently, with new AI features, more collaborative features, and its platform independence for key apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook."

Some Office apps will get other design and usability changes as well, which might require some user retraining. The Verge added: "Icons are only one part of design, and Microsoft is making some subtle changes to Office elsewhere. The software giant is simplifying its ribbon interface and bringing its Fluent Design system from Windows 10 to Office apps ... One of Microsoft’s most popular mobile apps, Outlook Mobile, is also getting a major design overhaul soon with shared mailbox support and new gestures for accounts and folders."

Are changes to Office a sign of progress, or would you rather have them stick to the same look and feel forever?

And you can't not know this.

NASA hosts $2.6B competition for lunar transportation contracts

To achieve their goal of getting back to the moon quickly, on Nov. 30, NASA announced that 9 companies are going to compete for $2.6 billion in contracts to build transport vehicles to deliver payloads to the Earth's natural satellite. The competition will include: Lockheed Martin, Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, Moon Express, Draper, Intuitive Machines, Deep Space Systems and Orbit Beyond.

According to Business Insider,

"The effort is a new phase of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which aims to encourage commercial moon missions. (NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine) said NASA's scientific division, not its human-exploration division, would decide how the money is spent.

"He said he viewed the $2.6 billion in potential contracts (it's unlikely all of this money would be spent) as a way to spur companies to 'compete on cost and innovation so that we, as NASA, can do more than we've ever been able to do before.'"

In other words, NASA is doing more with less. And hopefully this competition will allow the project to move along very quickly. According to BI, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science, explained that the agency would create a catalog of payloads for the companies to bid on taking to the moon. The first round of proposals are due in January, NASA said in a release.

Additionally, "the first missions could fly to the moon as soon as 2019, though possibly as late as 2022."

42 Replies

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Back to the moon as soon as next year? That would be amazing. I was a Technical Editor over at Lockheed Martin a while back, working on a different bid for NASA... exciting times, and also long hours, trying to see if you can pull it all together. :)

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So the first bidding process ends in January... so they're saying that they anticipate one of these 9 company's might pull it off in less than a year? wow! if only they could have that kind of turnaround for manned spacecraft.

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Falcon Heavy can easily reach the Moon. What we don't currently have is a soft landing capability. For manned capability the Falcon Dragon capsule should be human rated sometime in 2019. I wonder how much it would take for SpaceX to land a rocket on the Moon but with sufficient fuel to return to the Earth.

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Just when I was getting used to the ribbon interface they plan to change it?

I still hate the ribbon interface... anything that's not on the tab I'm on is either in my quick launch bar or I have to search for it... I don't have time to learn what each tab is in each program.... They're usually well laid out, but when they're not its SO frustrating. Their "what are you trying to do" feature is so much better and takes up almost no space, and I'm all about vertical space efficiency on my 21x9 and 16x9 monitors....

I think the ribbon made way more sense on 4x3, but I absolutely hated it ever since I got my first 14x9 monitor (somewhere around 2008? Ribbon started in 2007 right?) and it only got worse as monitors got wider.

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The new icons have been showing in O365 versions of Office 2016 for 2 months now, causing confusion among the more change resistant. I haven't seen much functionality change yet, although the management portal has been a PITA for the last year.

Sometimes change is good. We don't want to keep living with the same old-fashioned tech. But at the same time, IT pros around the world will surely get some tickets about changes coming soon to Microsoft Office from users who are stuck in their ways."

I get frantic tickets from users when they inadvertently remove the home button in a browser. What they are going to do will cause chaos in the work place. I am cringing at the thought of endless tickets in relation to this already. Leave to MS to change something not necessary

I like the visual changes made to Office over the years well enough, but as to functionality I can't think of any new features that we would have paid to upgrade for since at least Office 2010 and possibly Office 2007.

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I like the visual changes made to Office over the years well enough, but as to functionality I can't think of any new features that we would have paid to upgrade for since at least Office 2010 and possibly Office 2007.

words gotten much better revision and group working tools, translation built in, the ability to pull images from the web within word, ability to remove backgrounds from images you put into word, and a lot better formatting tools. I'd probably pay for the changes as a personal user. I'm sure there's much more changes I haven't used or noticed.

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Is that 500 million unique customers, or 10 records each for 50 million unique customers, or 50 individual fields of data each for 10 million customers?

I ask, because without doing any research, I have a hard time believing 500 million unique customers have stayed at Marriot group properties in the last 4 years.

Research done. Marriott owns 5700 hotels with about 1.1 million total rooms. If a new guest stayed in a hotel room everyday and they were booked full all the time then that would be 401,500,000 people (records) per year given that no one stayed multiple times. So that is not very realistic, so let's say at any given moment their hotels are always on average a quarter of the way booked up and on average guests stay for 1 week. That would put their yearly guest average to about 14.3 million per year. It is also important to note that is is by room and not by person. More than one person in a room and if multiple peoples information is put in then that could drastically change these numbers. Also it is important to note that all of this is just guess work and speculation. The article does say guest reservation database, perhaps that number is much larger as many people book and then cancel so who knows. Still 500 million records is a metric "you know what" ton of data. I just stayed in a Marriott this past summer and I got to tell you I don't feel great about this.

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Is that 500 million unique customers, or 10 records each for 50 million unique customers, or 50 individual fields of data each for 10 million customers?

I ask, because without doing any research, I have a hard time believing 500 million unique customers have stayed at Marriot group properties in the last 4 years.

Not too hard to believe. They have over 6,000 properties worldwide in 120 countries, looks like around 1.2 million rooms (2016 numbers). Even if you say they average 50% occupancy that is 657 million in 3 years. I am betting their average occupancy is well over 50%.